Business Intelligence

Informed decisions with intuitive and comprehensive predictive insight available to all users.

Use rich and innovative algorithms

• Forecast sales and inventory, and discover which items tend to be sold together.

• Identify the most profitable customers, and anticipate customer losses.

• Determine how to increase the effectiveness of your website and marketing campaigns.

• Uncover non-intuitive relationships in data.

• Look for themes and trends in unstructured text.

• Identify and handle anomalies during data transfer or data loading.

Enjoy a comprehensive development environment

• Benefit from using the Microsoft Visual Studio–based Business Intelligence Development Studio throughout the development life cycle.

• Rely on familiar, visual tools to build sophisticated models and interactive visualizations.

• Increase developer productivity by using various designers and best-practice checkers.

• Gain more information, validation, and control with the Data Mining Client for Excel, delivering a full data-mining development life cycle for advanced users.

Deliver insight through Microsoft Office

• Empower users to harness data-mining technology from within the familiar spreadsheet environment by using the SQL Server 2008 Data Mining Add-ins for Microsoft Office.

• Experience seamless transition between discovery and exploration by relying on Data Mining Add-ins for Microsoft Excel that hide complexity behind intuitive tasks.

• Render annotatable graphical views of findings with the Data Mining Templates for Microsoft Visio.

Take advantage of enterprise-grade capabilities

• Enhance the Analysis Services predictive solution with enterprise-class server advantages such as high availability, superior performance, and scalability.

• Enhance operational manageability through SQL Server Management Studio.

• Use lift and profit charts and cross-validation to compare and contrast the quality of models visually and statistically before deploying them.

• Benefit from flexibility that enables users to build diverse data-mining models over filtered data.

Integrate prediction into every step of the data life cycle to discover hidden insights.

Integrate quality data by using in-flight mining

• Benefit from the extract, transform, and load (ETL) process in Integration Services to cleanse data as it’s added to the data warehouse.

• Use Integration Services to manage anomalous data and values, classify entities, predict missing values, and perform mining.

Perform insightful analysis

• Include data-mining results as dimensions in OLAP cubes, slicing data by the hidden patterns within.

• Add prediction functions to calculations and key performance indicators (KPIs).

Natively integrate data reporting

• Build reports with Reporting Services by using data-mining queries as the data source.

• Query against the data-mining structure to present data beyond the limitations of the mining-model requirements.

Use predictive KPIs

• Benefit from the integration between Analysis Services and Microsoft SharePoint Server.

• Combine predictive and retrospective KPIs to forecast future performance against targets.

• Detect and possibly resolve problems proactively.

• Discover attributes that influence KPIs.

• Monitor trends in key influencers to determine whether their effects are temporary or long lasting.

Extend prediction and enhance your data-mining functionality to create intelligent applications.

Build applications by using predictive programming

• Take advantage of XMLA, Data Mining Extensions, ADOMD.NET, OLE DB, and Analysis Management Objects.

• Build data-mining-aware applications by using these familiar tools and development platform.

Customize algorithms and visualizations

• Expand the SQL Server 2008 R2 data-mining toolset.

• Solve unique needs by using procedures, Predictive Model Markup Language, algorithms, and visualizations.

Microsoft has a robust partner ecosystem that is developing solutions utilizing SQL Server Data Mining enhancements. With Data Mining, you are now able to build multiple data mining models within a single structure or take advantage of the new Data Mining add-ins for the 2010 Office system. Our partners can help you learn more.

Apollo Data Technologies

• Apollo Data Technologies is the first company delivering true predictive analytic solutions for key vertical markets. As one of the initial partners to successfully validate the power of SQL Server 2005 Data Mining (SSDM), Apollo’s team of world-renowned and award-winning Ph.D.’s utilizes SSDM to develop tailored models for their clients to ultimately help them operate more effectively and efficiently.

Elder Research, Inc.

• Elder Research, Inc. is a leader in the practice of Data Mining—discovering useful patterns in data and successfully harnessing the information gained. The principals are active researchers in Data Mining, contributing to the literature of this emerging field in books, conferences, and through highly regarded short courses and training seminars.

G-STAT

• G-STAT is a leader in development and integration of advanced data mining and analytical solutions. With over 120 data mining experts, utilizing the most advanced BI and data mining technologies, G-STAT has become one of Europe's largest data mining Centers of Excellence, with numerous successes in various sectors such as finance, telecom, retail, and healthcare.

Hitachi Consulting

• Hitachi Consulting is a global business and IT consulting company, a recognized thought leader in Business Intelligence and Performance Management (BIPM), which consistently delivers BIPM solutions to empower organizations like yours with the insight necessary to make better decisions faster.

• We partner with our clients and offer unique expertise in conceiving and crafting data mining and advanced analytics into the fact-based BIPM solutions to provide insights in a business user–friendly context that promotes greater understanding, trust, relevance, and organization-wide usage.

SPSS

• SPSS has become a leader in predictive analytics technologies through a combination of commitment to innovation and dedication to customers. You will find SPSS customers in virtually every industry, including telecommunications, banking, finance, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, consumer packaged goods, higher education, government, and market research.

SYMPHIC Technology

• SYMPHIC Technology is a Microsoft partner and leading provider of SQL Server Business Intelligence (BI) training. Through our focused, quality training, we accelerate your learning to help you build your SQL Server BI skills quickly and maximize the return on your SQL Server investment.

Visual Numerics

• Visual Numerics has provided advanced analytics and expert consulting services to technical, business, and scientific communities worldwide for over three decades. Its gold-standard numerical analysis software, the IMSL® Numerical Libraries, powerful visualization tools, the PV-WAVE® Family, and expert consulting have helped companies quickly develop reliable and accurate applications for high-performance computing environments. These applications allow business and technical users to gain new insight into their data while maximizing return on investment.